The Cave of St. Anne

The final hermitage: in the summer following his 1952 arrival at St. George of Choziba, John Jacob withdrew to the ancient cliff-cave called the cell of St. Anne, where he lived his last seven years in extreme asceticism and unceasing prayer, attended by his disciple Ioanichie Pârâială, and where the greater part of his religious poetry was written. Here he completed the desert Fathers’ movement from the coenobium to the solitary cell.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox (20th-c. hermit of the Judean desert; glorified 1992)

The Withdrawal to the Cave

The Monastery of St. George of Choziba, into whose community John Jacob entered in November 1952, possessed among its cliffs a number of the ancient hermits’ caves used since antiquity by monks seeking the greater solitude. In the summer of 1953, the year after his arrival, John Jacob withdrew from the monastery proper to one of these — the cave-cell known as the Chilia Sfânta Ana, the cell of St. Anne, high in the rock of the Wadi Qelt, a dependency of St. George of Choziba (Romanian synodal Life, Viața Sfântului Cuvios Ioan Iacob de la Neamț; parohia-sf-ioan-iacob-hozevitul.ro, “Viața Sfântului Ioan Iacob Hozevitul,” which names “a cave called the Cell of Saint Ana … where he spent his last years living a very austere life”). There he remained until his death in 1960 — some seven years in the cave (parohia-sf-ioan-iacob-hozevitul.ro; and see the note on his years there in editions of Hrană Duhovnicească, which describe the poetry as written during his labor “for 7 years with harsh ascetic practices” at the cell of St. Anne).

The withdrawal is the fulfillment of the pattern his whole life had traced: from the Moldavian monastery of Neamț, to the private desert cave of his first Palestinian years, to the Great Lavra of St. Sabbas, to the pastoral charge by the Jordan, and now — laying down all office and even the common life of the coenobium — to the solitary cell in which the desert Fathers ended their course. This is the ancient lavriotic progression to its term: the monk who has proved himself in the common life is at last permitted the greater and more dangerous solitude (see St. Sabbas the Sanctified; Orthodoxy: Monasticism).

The Life in the Cave

The Romanian accounts are unanimous, and unusually well-attested by a surviving eyewitness, on the severity of the life John Jacob lived at the cell of St. Anne. His food was minimal — bread, a little water, what the desert and the charity of the monastery afforded; his sleep was scant; his days and nights were given to the Jesus Prayer, the reading of Scripture and the Fathers, the divine services which he kept in his cave, and — remarkably for a hermit of such austerity — to writing (synodal Life; Bălan, The Romanian Patericon; and see the-spiritual-writings.md). The cave was cramped, hot, and comfortless; the tradition dwells on the physical hardship of the site as the arena of his ascetic labor, and on the interior peace and even joy that the sources report in him despite it. The portrait is of a classic Judean desert hermit, living in the twentieth century the life of the fourth — but doing so, tellingly, with a pen.

The single most important circumstance of the cave years, for the historian, is the presence of the disciple. Ioanichie Pârâială, the Romanian monk who had come with John Jacob to Choziba in 1952, lived with him at or near the cell of St. Anne, served him, and remained with him to his death — and then survived him by decades, guarding his tomb for the twenty years until the finding of the relics (synodal Life; parohia-sf-ioan-iacob-hozevitul.ro, which records that Ioanichie “remained with the saint until his death and cared for his tomb for 20 years afterward”). It is largely through Ioanichie’s testimony, gathered into the Romanian synodal and monastic accounts, that the intimate details of the cave life reach us; the hermit was hidden, but not unwitnessed, and the reliability of the portrait rests in good part on this one faithful disciple (on the source value of the disciple’s testimony, see the-sources-for-his-life.md).

The Poetry of the Cave

The cell of St. Anne is not only where John Jacob died; it is where he became a poet. The Romanian tradition holds that it was precisely in the solitude of this cave, in the moments of rest at the cave’s mouth, that he composed the greater part of the religious verse that is his most distinctive bequest — the poems later gathered in Hrană Duhovnicească (editions of Hrană Duhovnicească, ed. Lumina din Lumina, prefatory matter, which locates the poems’ composition at the cell of St. Anne; and see the-hymnographer-of-the-desert.md). That a hermit of such austerity should also be, in his cave, a prolific and disciplined poet is the paradox at the heart of his portrait, and it is what most distinguishes him from the ancient hermits he imitated: the desert of the Fathers produced sayings; this modern desert produced, in addition, a book of verse. The cave of St. Anne, then, is the physical center of gravity of the whole collection — the place of his severest asceticism, his richest writing, his death, and, after his death, of the relics reported incorrupt.

See Also

References

  • Viața Sfântului Cuvios Ioan Iacob de la Neamț (Hozevitul) — the Romanian synodal Life, in Viețile Sfinților for August. (The 1953 withdrawal to the cell of St. Anne; the ascetic life; the disciple Ioanichie.)
  • “Viața Sfântului Ioan Iacob Hozevitul.” parohia-sf-ioan-iacob-hozevitul.ro. (The cave called the Cell of St. Anne; the austere last years; Ioanichie’s care of the tomb for twenty years.)
  • Hrană Duhovnicească, ed. Lumina din Lumina (Bucharest, 2000), prefatory matter. (The poems composed at the cell of St. Anne during his seven years there.)
  • Bălan, Archimandrite Ioanichie. The Romanian Patericon. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (The life in the cave and the disciple’s testimony.)